~ Weddings and more since 1994

Peace of mind

Sometimes, you hear stories like the one below and it disheartens you and really leaves a bad taste regarding paying someone to photograph your wedding day. One such story showed on Wedding Wire today.

“Today I get a text to call him back. And when I called, it was to tell me that his car had been broken into and his laptop with my pictures stolen. I must admit I shut down so some of the conversation is blurred. I think he said his second photographer had some backups as did he. The problem here is that he is also a friend, but I paid him to do the work for me. It’d been just over a month since the wedding and I didn’t nag because our contract stated 2 months. I’d hate to end a friendship over this and will give him the 2 weeks for him to give me what he’s got, but I know it will be nowhere near what I paid for. I’m so glad that so many people took pictures at the weddings, but they are not the quality of the cameras that he had. And it’s not like it’s an even that can be repeated. I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to call DH (I’m on travel for work) and tell him the news. I was so excited to be going home and now this. SMH.”

I feel for both the bride and photographer in this scenario. The bride is stressing over her wedding pictures entrusted to whoever she hired. We don’t know anything about him. Plus, the photographer must be freaking out a bit as long as he cares.

Who knows?

You can set your mind at ease because A Classic Image Photographytakes strides to prevent this kind of thing. In 18 years I have never lost images. I could bad mouth the unknown photographer, but it does no good to sow discord. I can only hope, for her sake, that he did think to back up his work and has some form of insurance to help recoup her costs at least.

Not all photographers are alike. I have had lengthy discussions in a pro forum about the need to back up and backup the backup.

Here is how we roll at A Classic Image Photography.

For starters, I keep the SD card in a hard case in my shirt pocket so it doesn’t go missing.

As soon as I can, usually the same day, I upload images from the SD card to the laptop so have a copy there. I then store the SD card, locked to prevent data loss, for safe keeping. It’s not reformatted until the wedding is closed out.

I then take the laptop copy and copy it to my 8GB flash drive. That’s copy two.

Then I copy the files to my office desktop machine and make a backup of that. That’s copies three and four.

Edited images for preview have their own folder separate from the others.

I have insurance through PPA, but I’m gonna make sure I do my due diligence with my client’s memories.

Hopefully, this illustrates the fact that we care about your wedding memories and do all we can to protect them. Your peace of mind is important to us.